Had to take a detour from my backend pursuits to update my portfolio. I did not realize that a bunch of the links to Netlify projects were dead and no longer active. I knew this day would come but I forgot to check when that was. Now I have to build a site to host my demo projects permanently. Hopefully that will reduce the likelihood that I will need to revisit this issue again.
The challenge is that I do not have access to a Node.js server so I will have to settle for my good old LAMP stack server. The cool thing is that I can now just run the apache server locally without using my xampp GUI, since I know where the executable lives. I added the httpd executable to my PATH so now I just turn it on while working on the projects site and turn if off when I am done. Really cool how far I have come. I imagine if I wanted to run some WordPress sites locally I could just turn on the MySQL server as well with similar results. I finally understand how this stuff works and it feels great!!! Progress is amazing.
TLDR;
Okay, so here are the highlights of what I did:
- Portfolio -> Started working on a projects hosting site so that my portfolio won’t point to dead links. I had to perform some updates since most of my React projects are built for a root homepage rather than a subfolder.
- Practice -> Continued working through the practice ‘Local Library’ project in the MDN ExpressJS guide. Started on part 6 of the tutorial. This is the last part and deals with handling form submission data using Pug and Express. The article has a nice review section on HTML forms as well which is nice.
Goal For Round 8 of the #100DaysofCode Challenge
This is my eighth round of the “#100daysofcode” challenge. I will be continuing my work from round five, six, and seven into round eight. I was working through the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. My goal was to become more familiar with algorithms and data structures. This goal was derived from my goal to better understand operating systems and key programs that I use in the terminal regularly e.g. Git. This goal was in turn derived from my desire to better understand the fundamental tools used for coding outside of popular GUIs. This in turn was derived from my desire to be a better back-end developer.
I am currently putting a pause on the algorithm work to build some backend/full stack projects. I primarily want to improve my skills with the back-end from an implementation perspective. I have improved tremendously in terminal and CLI skills but I lost focus due to how abstract the algorithm concepts got. I wanted to work on things that were more tangible until I can get to a position where I could directly benefit from improving my algorithm skills and theoretical knowledge. So that’s the focus right now. Build my backend skills and prove my full stack capabilities by building some dope projects.
Again, I still have no idea if my path is correct but I am walking down this road anyways. Worst case scenario I learn a whole bunch of stuff that will help me out on my own personal projects. Best case scenario I actually become one of those unicorn developers that go on to start a billion dollar company… You never know LOL.